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Getting down to owning only three tablets-Asus Vivotab Smart, Amazon HDX 8.9″, and a rarely used Barnes & Nobles HD+ 8.9″, I was feeling the urge to purchase a new device. However, the tablets I already owned pretty much covered everything I needed a tablet to do. When I saw the JXD S7800b for a relatively modest $150 shipped, I thought, here’s something I’ve never had, a dedicated gaming tablet(I had to justify the purchase somehow). So order it up, I did.

2Gb ram is pretty nice, and it recently is available with 16Gb storage, initially it only was available with 8Gb. I had been wary of the RK3188 chip, it seemed to be nowhere near what was expected of it, performance-wise. However, in a 7″ 1280×800 tablet, I figured it would be good enough.

As you can see, it has a d-pad, right and left joysticks, as well as a ton of buttons to use in playing various games. It’s pretty thick, but not really too heavy. Build quality is okay, not great. The screen is nice, viewable from extreme angles, and colors look good on it, while touch response is also good. Mini HDMI out is great for playing games on your tv, but I don’t much like the round plug connector for charging-USB charging would have been better. If you want to, you can hack a USB cable and the existing plug for charging, but you need 2amps.

The stock firmware is not very modified, but limits the cpu speed to 1.4GHz. You can download a firmware from JXD which runs at 1.6GHz, or do what I did, load up a custom rom. There are several available, and the one I’m using now has an overclocked kernel at 1.7GHz. The difference in performance is well worth the little bit of time it takes to download and flash the new firmware. And battery life is still pretty good, I would say around 4 hours of gaming is possible.

Ah, gaming. That’s what this tablet is all about. There is a nice little app loaded on it named, oddly, Happy Chick. You can download this for free from the Google Play store. It has a ton of emulators-GBA, N64, PSP, PS, MAME, SFC/SNES, NDS, and others. You can search for games for each emulator, for certain categories like racing or RPG, or use a variety of other filters. The collection of games available is pretty huge.

Once you download a game, if the emulator for that game isn’t already on your device it will be automatically downloaded. One thing you have to do is go into the settings for each emulator and disable the virtual on-screen controls before playing. So how well does it work? That depends on the emulator, and the complexity of the game.

For NES and PS roms, the ones I’ve tried run very smooth. The arcade games also seem to run very well. N64 games are where I ran into a few glitches. The sound often is poor, although gameplay is good-Super Smash Brothers is a good example. Conker’s Bad Fur Day seems slow, with the same sound issues. Metal Slug, an arcade title with many sequels, is a favorite choice, and it runs great. Some screenshots-

Lemmings

Metal Slug

Castlevania

Castlevania, one of my favorite games, plays nicely. Other games will occasionally freeze up, or the controls will get wonky. Usually restarting the game fixes that. I get the feeling there’s a learning curve to tweaking the emulators to get the best performance, and also to get the best roms. The question becomes, how is the tablet overall? It does what it sets out to do, play most roms, and play well. It isn’t perfect by any stretch, and the rk3188 chip shows it’s limitations even in such a small screen device, with not-overpowering resolution. The Happy Chick app makes it easy to get started using the emulators, and the built-in button mapping ability is handy. But I think you have to eventually start getting roms from outside the app’s choices(which are large). And there’s a fairly new Dreamcast emulator, Reicast, which looks very promising.

I like playing a lot of older games, Contra 3, Galaxian, Lemmings, Rampage, Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Street Fighter, etc. All play nice with the JXD S7800B, and for me, it’s a worthy purchase. For retro game fans, this is also a good choice. Additionally, it would make a good distraction for younger kids who haven’t got into the console/pc gaming scene yet, but need entertaining.

About Will765 -
Bill Anderson posts under the clever alias will765. Gets to work from a home office for a piano moving company, in glorious Lake Hopatcong, NJ.
Pretty new to android, but love technology and have been building my own(and friends)pc's for about 15 years

I am interested in buying this JXD S7800b gaming tablet, but am wary of its build quality and battery, since the brand isn’t very famous.

Have you used this tablet for other purposes — surfing the web, watching Youtube HD videos, editing documents, etc.? How does this JXD S7800b tablet perform for that kind of regular usage compared to your existing tablets?

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